summer 2017

Dark was the day when my darling daughter came home from fourth grade wielding the dreaded note from the school nurse:

Kindly observe your child for the following signs of pediculosis:

sticky white deposits on scalp

sesame-seed-shaped insects in hair

Kindly hardly described the way I took a step back and asked my daughter, “So who’s got the cooties in your class?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Well, which of the Codys or Dakotas has been absent?” I asked.

My daughter reported that Cody Number One and Two were in class. Also both Dakotas. Before she could run through the entire roll call—twin Tiffanys, multiple Ashleys, half a dozen Madisons—I handed her back the note and headed down the hall.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“To take a shower.”

“But the note says you’re supposed to give me a head check.”

I prodded my daughter into the bathroom, flicked on the overhead light, and parted her thin blond hair with a black plastic comb.

“No sesame seeds in here,” I reported as I inspected her squeaky-clean scalp. “Or here. Or here.”

I was about to sound a cheerful all clear when I spotted a single glossy white bulb clinging to the base of her neck. I tried to convince myself the white spot was just dandruff. But I knew all too well what a nit looked like, because once upon a time my whole head had been studded with them.

I remember 1970 as The Year of the Lice. One morning as my three older sisters and I were braiding our hip-length hair, one said, “Hey, there are bugs in my brush.”

We stared down at her blue paddle hairbrush, where half a dozen brown bugs weeviled their way through the pale white bristles, crafty as maggots on rotten cheese.

My mother was summoned. She grimly parted each girl’s hair and then spoke the unspeakable word four times:

“Lice.”

“Lice.”

“Lice.”

“Lice.”

I wanted to die. We had bugs! (and bugs! and bugs! and bugs!) The only good thing about bugs! was that my mother ordered us to stay home from school. Ordinarily I loved sick days—lolling on the couch with a cold washcloth on my hot forehead, watching reruns of I Love Lucy. But now I slumped in an armchair, scratching my suddenly itchy scalp, and glumly listening to my sisters blame the lice on one another: You used my comb. You wore my hat. You borrowed my barrettes. Well, YOU like John Lennon better than Paul McCartney, so you probably got the bugs first!

I sat there in silence, convinced we had lice because I had stolen a quarter from the loose change my mother stored in a chipped New York Mets mug. With my booty, I had purchased a forbidden pack of Twinkies from Molly Bruno’s Market and had failed to admit my sin at Confession. Clearly it was all my fault God had sent down a plague of cooties upon our heads.

Desperate to lay the blame on somebody else’s nit-filled head, I said, “We have lice because we’re poor.”

My mother swatted me on the back of my head. “Only poor people are poor!”

I couldn’t argue with that statement. But my sisters cringed, knowing I had set my mother off on what we called one of Ma’s old scagiole and fagiole stories.

I closed my eyes (and wished I could close my ears) as my mother catalogued the hardships of her own childhood: nine kids in three rooms, an outhouse instead of a toilet, scagiole and fagiole (dandelion greens and white beans) every night for supper.

“We had lice so bad,” Ma said, “that my mother washed our hair with kerosene. When that didn’t get rid of the bugs, she took out a razor and shaved our heads.”

We shrieked. “You aren’t going to shave us bald, are you?”

My mother got a Sweeney Todd-like look in her eyes. Then she laced up her gray suede Hush Puppies (also known as her clodhoppers) and marched down to the corner drugstore to buy the necessary de-bugging supplies. When she returned, she led us into the cellar, a damp dungeon where bare light bulbs hung from the ceiling, cobwebs hung in the high windows, and daddy long-leg spiders crept along the exposed eaves.

In the back corner sat a monstrous white enamel sink with two rickety spigots. One by one, my mother forced us to stand on a step stool and lean over the smelly drain while she sudsed our hair and dug her unforgiving nails into our tender scalps. The Kwell shampoo smelled like cherry cough syrup. And the fine-tooth comb my mother scraped over our scalps and raked through our tangles seemed like one of those instruments of torture—arrows, hooks, whips, nails—used to send virgin martyrs to their sainthood.

I stood there with wet hair, shivering, as I sent up my prayer to whichever saint served as patron/patroness of pediculosis: please take these disgusting bugs away and I will never eat a Twinkie again. But my prayers must have gotten misdirected, because the next morning I woke up and a bug crawled out of my ear. And my sisters’ long, thick braids were strung, like Christmas trees, with glistening bulblike nits.

My mother clodhopped it back to the drugstore. Again with the Kwell. Again with the fine-tooth comb. Again my mother lined us up in a row, oldest to youngest, and forced us to pull nits from each other’s hair. We looked like chimpanzees grooming each other at the Bronx Zoo. We also looked like four girls who feared our mother was nuts enough to take a Norelco shaver to our heads.

For close to a week we stayed home from school to wage The War Against the Lice. We sterilized our brushes and combs in ammonia, and washed all our clothes and towels and sheets in Clorox. Every night beneath the bedcovers, I clasped my hands together and told God how sorry I was for my Twinkie-greed.

My fervent acts of contrition must have done some good, because finally the nits took a 24-hour hiatus.

“Back to school tomorrow,” my mother announced.

We groaned. “What do we say when people ask us where we’ve been?”

“Say you were home sick,” Ma said.

The next morning I met my friend Laurie at the corner.

“Where were you?” she asked.

“Homesick,” I quickly said.

“Why are you talking like Donald Duck?”

“My nose is stuffed.” I summoned a fake cough from the depths of my lungs.

She took a step back from my spittle-spray. “Gimme the news, not the weather!”

When we reached the playground, I was careful to cough some more to keep my classmates at bay. But once we filed into the classroom, I knew my number was up. I’d been seated in the front row because I couldn’t see the blackboard without my monstrously thick tortoiseshell eyeglasses. I was terrified a louse lurked in my curls, just waiting for a chance to jump onto the long-division worksheet of the Maria or Donna or Donna Maria who sat behind me.

I sat on my hands, trying not to scratch my tingling scalp, all through mathematics. Halfway through 36,078 divided by 51, I looked up and saw an alarming specter—dressed in a white bonnet, white uniform, white tights, and white shoes—standing at the front of the class.

This walking, talking, sanitary pad was called Nurse.

“Boys and girls,” Nurse said. “Line up outside my office.”

We put down our pencils and jostled down the hall. The rumors ran thick. A Donna claimed Nurse was doing vision checks. A Stevie said she wanted to test our hearing. A Joey claimed Nurse wanted to give us all a shot to keep us from going mentally retarded.

We scoffed. “You’re born retarded, yuh retard.”

I alone suspected the gruesome truth: Nurse was about to conduct a dreaded scalp check.

One by one, Nurse summoned us into her office. When it was my turn, I slowly walked in and found Nurse standing next to a gooseneck pharmaceutical lamp, a pair of tongue depressors in her hand.

“Stand here.” She pointed beneath the bright light.

Nurse repeatedly parted my hair with her tongue depressors, as if they were chopsticks and she were searching for some tasty water chestnuts in a bowl of chop suey. Then she sniffed my hair.

“What shampoo do you use?” she asked.

“Head and Shoulders,” I lied.

“What for?”

“Dandruff.”

She let loose a suspicious hmph. “Your teacher said you were out of school last week.”

“I was home sick.” I coughed without covering my mouth.

She stepped back and checked my name off the list.

I had passed the test, or else we all had flunked it, because at the end of the day our teacher distributed to the entire class a Nurse note, fresh off the blue mimeograph machine, that read:

Your child must be treated for head lice IMMEDIATELY. Please call the principal’s office if you need this notice translated into Italian.

Some of the Stevies held the note to their noses and pretended to get high off the heady mimeograph fumes. Some of the Tonys made the note into paper airplanes. The Angelinas and Rosarios who couldn’t read English conferred together in Italian. On the walk home, the girls gossiped about who had spread the head lice (prime suspects: the Sicilians) while the boys loudly blamed each other:

“You got duh bugs!”

“No, you got duh bugs!”

“Go fongool!”

“Fongool yourself, ya fuggin’ fongool-oid!”

Finally it was just me and Laurie left on the street. Laurie—who had begun to develop—knowingly told me, “I heard you could get bugs down there.”

“Where down there?”

“In your down-there hair.”

I had no such hair yet. So I claimed, “I heard you can get lice in your armpits.”

Laurie sniffed. “I shave my armpits and I wear deodorant.”

“So do I,” I said, even though the closest I ever had come to a can of Ban was when my sister sprayed a louse that had crawled down my forehead.

I was the first of my sisters to return home from school. Since I already had a mortal sin on my soul, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to add a venial. So I retreated to a small room at the back of our house known as The Sun Parlor. Here my mother, a former Army nurse, kept her old nursing manual. I pulled down the book, opened it to the gynecology chapter, and stared down in horror at the black-and-white photographs. The vaginas looked like lobster rolls, the Candida albicans looked like tartar sauce, and the pubic lice looked like the sign that hung above the door of my favorite Cape Cod restaurant: WELCOME TO JOE’S CRAB SHACK!

As I searched in vain for a photo of a penis, a tiny grown bug fell out of my bangs and onto a photo of a swollen breast. I jumped, then slammed the book shut, squishing the louse between the pages. Convinced I had to get rid of the bugs before they migrated DOWN THERE, I ran into the kitchen and told my mother I had to go to Wednesday confession.

“What for?” she asked.

“Because you kept us home from church last week,” I said.

My mother herded us all down to church. I loathed confession because I always got stuck with Father Eyebrows. I parted the red velvet curtain and entered the dark, hushed wooden cabinet. I knelt and jumped when he pushed back the screen. I didn’t dare tell Father I had stolen a quarter. So I said, “I lied.”

“Is there anything else you want to confess? Any impure acts? Any sins of the flesh?”

Since I had looked at the photos of the lobster roll vaginas, I said, “I guess.”

He let out a sorrowful groan. “How old are you?”

“Ten.”

“God is very displeased,” he said.

Father’s usual penance was three Hail Marys and two Our Fathers. I could whip those suckers off in less than sixty seconds. But now Father gave me ten Hails Marys and an Apostles Creed. Getting through all that would take me a good five minutes at the altar rail.

I ran up the aisle, mumbled through the prayers as fast as I could, then rejoined my sisters in the vestibule.

“You were up there a long time,” one sister said.

“I just wanted to look at the candles,” I lied. Then cringed. Such was being Catholic: no sooner did you go to confession than you had to return to confession. It was like having diarrhea for life—might as well just camp out in the bathroom, instead of bolting back and forth to the toilet.

On the way out of church, my mother reached beneath my chapel veil and nipped a nit off my hair. I was not cured. My soul had not been saved. I had made a bad confession and I was convinced I would have lice for life.

Eventually Rid and Nix slowly sent our lice on their merry way. But I always knew that these evil-weevil bugs would return to haunt me. Now seeing that solitary nit lurking on my daughter’s head, I asked her, “Have you been eating Twinkies?”

“What?”

I pinched the nit off her scalp and held it in front of her face. “This is a lice egg.”

She looked at it cross-eyed, then burst into tears.

I flicked the nit into the toilet, flushed it, then refrained from giving her a hug.

“Don’t move,” I said.

“Where are you going?”

“To get some bug-nuke-shampoo at the drugstore.”

I laced up my own version of Clodhoppers—a bulbous pair of Reebok Princesses—and drove to the drugstore. At the Walgreen’s I was too mortified to ask where the Lice-B-Gone was kept. As I trolled up and down the shampoo aisle several times, I remembered why I was a registered user of drugstore.com. Several quick clicks of the mouse and my cart was full of all the “discreet purchases” I was too mortified to buy in person: Super Plus Tampax, Wart-Off, Preparation H, Beano To-Go, Extra-Strength Gas-X.

“May I hellllp you to find your desired item?” a singsong voice asked.

I turned. A strikingly beautiful Indian clerk, with waist-length black hair, looked expectantly at me. I snatched an economy-size bottle of Head and Shoulders off the shelf. “Found it!” I said, and high-tailed it around the corner.

I turned down the aisle marked SEASONAL MERCHANDISE (which, since we lived in Florida, was perpetually stocked with flip-flops and beach towels). I skulked up and down the remaining aisles until I finally located the lice treatments tucked between the Tums and the Excedrin. I wondered which of the two brands—Rid or Ovide—would zap the lice most effectively. I also wondered if I should buy both, or stock up on several bottles of each in preparation for the infestation I knew lay ahead.

With many a furtive glance over my shoulder (what if a neighbor or colleague should see me?), I ditched the Head and Shoulders by a display of sleeping aids and carried one red-and-white box of lice shampoo to the pharmacy counter.

The pharmacist’s name tag read RAHESH.

“Are you having any questions?” Rahesh asked, as if I were on the verge of giving birth to multiple question marks.

“No questions,” I eked out—and paid with cash, so as not to leave any embarrassing record of my purchase behind.

When I got back home, my daughter was still standing in the bathroom, still crying.

“You told me not to move,” she said.

I marched her into the kitchen and fetched her a graham cracker. Then I opened the box of Rid and unfolded the instruction sheet. I read the directions in English, then re-read them in Spanish, a language I only half-understood, just to make sure I was following the proper procedure.

I turned on the sink. “Por favor: stick your head in.”

I doused her hair with water and half the bottle of shampoo. I tried to be gentle, but scrubbing the nits off her scalp was like trying to scrub soap scum off the bathroom tile with an SOS pad and Bon Ami.

“Ouch,” she kept saying.

“Hold still,” I said as I rinsed her scalp, like a head of cauliflower, with the vegetable sprayer.

I toweled her off and used my Conair 1800 to blast out whatever bugs remained.

“Are the bugs all gone now?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, with absolutely no conviction. “But now we have to comb the nits out of your hair.”

I got out the tiny red fine-tooth comb included in the Rid box, then suited up in an apron, a shower cap, and rubber gloves. I looked like I was about to start an eight-hour shift at the Perdue chicken slaughterhouse.

“Why are you dressed like that?” she asked.

“Because I don’t want to get lice again.”

“You mean you had it, too?”

“And how,” I said.

“Tell me all about it.”

I knew it would take a good half hour to search and destroy whatever nits I found still clinging to my daughter’s hair. I also knew I had turned into my mother when I launched into a good scagiole and fagiole tale myself.

“When I was ten,” I said, “my sisters and I had lice so bad, the bugs fell into our soup.”

“Ew! and then what?”

“We got infested so many times, we considered entering ourselves as an experiment in the state science fair.”

“Gross! and what then?”

“We had lice for weeks,” I said. “Months. Four seasons. A whole year.”

“You’re such a liar, Mommy. Nobody could have lice for that long.”

“Wanna bet?”

In 1970, the common louse was a hardy devil. But by 2001, when insects began to breed like bunnies on my daughter’s pretty blond hair, lice clearly had become super-Satanic. Every night I parted my daughter’s hair with a tongue depressor, and gazed through a magnifying glass to locate the lice. I squished countless bugs between my fingers. I used Scotch tape to pull the nits off the back of her neck. I dumped so much Rid on my kid’s head I feared she would grow a brain tumor. I vacuumed the carpet, upholstery, mattress, drapes. I vacuumed the ceiling—and still the scalp-biting, blood-sucking, egg-laying little creeps kept creeping back. And back. And back.

I considered spraying my daughter with a can of Raid. Sticking her head in the oven and baking the bugs off. Or sending her through a car wash, without the car to contain her. I Googled lice and discovered old-fashioned remedies—baking soda, olive oil—that didn’t work. I Froogled lice and found a product advertised as “used safely by ARMY RANGERS AND DESPERATE MOMS!” (their capitalization).

“And to think,” I told my daughter as I pulled the thousandth nit out of her hair, “that I used to wish you were twins.”

Twenty-first-century lice were capable of surviving a neutron bomb. But I knew I couldn’t keep my daughter out of the fourth grade forever. She’d never learn her multiplication tables. So I guiltily sent her back to school. Then I also returned to my teaching job. Although I was lice-free, I still felt like my whole head was crawling with cooties. So I gladly sat next to my worst enemy at faculty meetings, used any excuse to deliver mail to the dreaded dean’s office, and even considered stopping in on our highly overpaid university president for a friendly chat. Office hours? My door was wide open to the most troublesome students-—especially those who wrote thousand-page dungeons-and-dragons epics, in which the characters were called Mordren and Morwid and Morwon and the dialogue ran like this:

Be hold! A beast! Prepare to die beneath my sord, fowl creature!

Such students, I felt, deserved death by pediculosis.

I wanted to warn my friends to keep their distance. I also wanted to call the Cody- and Dakota-moms and ask how they were handling the ongoing infestation. But head lice are the silent farts of the Tupperware party, one of the few topics still taboo enough never to make an appearance on Oprah or Dr. Phil. Example: rather than admit I had been exposed to lice, I cancelled my next haircut. I feared my stylist would part my hair, spot a creepy-crawler, and blacklist me from all beauty salons forever.

Medical experts say lice have nothing to do with poor hygiene. But they miss the point: head lice make you feel dirty as a corner of the house no broom or mop or dustpan can reach. They also claim lice know no socioeconomic boundaries—that nits are just as likely to be found in the glossy up-dos of the privileged residents of Beverly Hills as in the snarled hair of the Beverly Hillbillies. Again, missed point: although I now lived in a suburban home (complete with in-ground swimming pool) having bugs made me feel poor as my grandmother, who had raised those nine children in three rooms and whose no-nonsense method of dealing with lice involved shaving all her kids’ heads.

I wasn’t willing to take a razor to my daughter’s head. After eight weeks of delousing her, I found myself considering desperate measures—buying each bug a ticket for a ten-day Caribbean cruise, joining WICCA so I could witchcraft the nits away.

“Don’t worry,” I told my tearful daughter as I yanked another nit out of her hair, “some day the bugs will get bored of you.”

“When?”

“Soon. And then the next time you see the bugs, they’ll be on your daughter.”

“Will you be there to help?”

“Of course.”

“But you told me you’d rather be dead than deal with this again.”

I stopped plucking nits and looked in the bathroom mirror. Suddenly I seemed old and aged as my mother. I should have shuddered at the thought of dealing with yet another round of lice.

I didn’t know what to call the stew of terror, shame, longing, ambition, and surrender that burbled through me on day one of sixth grade, when alphabetical necessity had placed my desk directly under the cliff of her multiple chins.

But we already knew what to call her. The name written in block letters on the board said Miss Hudgins, but in our lingo—and, we felt sure, the universe’s true and secret tongue—she was only Brillo.

She’d been at the Tufts School in South Medford since FDR’s second term, and we had inherited the nickname as a kind of talisman from the dark, backward and abysm of student loathing, in honor of the wreath of steel wool that bristled around her head like the Nazi infantry helmets we saw in World War II movies.

Everything about her was gray. Small, slate eyes were buried deep in the well-done steak of a face that seemed too ashen and jowelled ever to lift into mirth. Her burlappy dresses were like the drapes at the Dello Russo funeral home, outfits often festooned with charcoal buttons the size of Ring Dings. She was thick as a bear. The saber-like edge of her low alto—she was more of a baritone, in truth—struck fear into the hearts of even the street-toughest of her charges.

It took only a few days to teach us that in Brillo’s world all the most dismal trains of education would run on time. Rote drilling and an irritable strictness were the cornerstones of her pedagogy, with an occasional flourish of ridicule.

“I’m starting to think these pupils are stupid,” she once said, appealing to some absent authority, as we slumped in silence before some question about Johnny Tremaine. Once, reading aloud from a spelling test, I pronounced the word “spatula” spah-TOOL-ah and she lowered the boom over her glasses. “The whole world is not Italian,” she said, and a couple of girls behind me snickered. And then there was the morning Michael Marcarelli threw up at his seat, perhaps from the half-pint carton of nearly room temperature milk we bought for fifteen cents at lunch every day and which, in that era before expiration dates, often tasted a tick or two past its prime. Brillo looked down with an aggrieved expression at the desktop covered with barf. “I see that some of us are not quite house broken,” she said. Student scuttlebutt told of the time she had spit in the face of Tommy Alonardo, now a huge seventh grader, when he had called another kid a fugginape in class.

She had made of our flat greater Boston accent a pretentious, pseudo-British tremolo—in South Medford we were unfamiliar with the concept of “Brahmin,” though her name and her accent strongly suggested she wasn’t from here. Whenever we (finally!) lined up correctly for recess or group trips to the basement (her euphemism for the bathroom), she opened the vowels of command like Mountbatten: You may pahhss, clahhss.

In the classroom, she had stationed her desk under the windows behind us and to our left, the better to monitor all whispers, passed notes, shy glances, false bodily functions, and other distracting transgressions.

From my front row seat, especially, every lesson was Attack of the Fifty Foot Teacher. Her habitual classroom posture was to tuck one menacing forearm under her breasts—whether to project them as a threat or prevent them from sliding all the way to the floor was an object of playground debate—and, with the free hand, hector us with a yard-long wooden pointer she could crack impressively against a variety of surfaces to regain our perpetually slack attention. Years later, when I first read Great Expectations and Dickens’ description of Tickler—the switch with which Pip’s severe older sister “brings him up by hand”—my memory immediately brought back the sight and sound of Brillo’s fearful dowel.

Not that she ever touched us with it. She didn’t have to.

Instead, thrusting it impatiently against a defenseless map, she propounded at length the domino theory of American foreign policy, beating into our twenty-seven gaping faces with the subtlety of a Khruschevian shoe-bang exactly why we were in Vietnam and MUST continue fighting there. She thrust at Australia, which seemed to cower under the rubber tip of her pointer like a lost piglet. “We don’t want communism THE-YAH,” she barked, and on we went to the Greek myths. I didn’t get it. How would communism, which was apparently some kind of Russian and Chinese mental illness, but highly communicable (hence, I thought, the name), get onto this big island, and, once there, what was bad about having it surrounded on all sides by water and a coral reef heavily populated, as I knew from my fifth-grade oceanography project, with man-eating sharks? That seemed like good containment to me. Though we didn’t understand a thing, we quaked in agreement. And so, with the terrorized awe of the orthodox, none dared utter aloud within the temple of her classroom the dark magic of that nickname.

From our second-floor classroom three sets of twelve-over-twelve windows looked down on a narrow lawn behind the chain-link fence that separated us from the sidewalk of Medford Street, the main drag. One fall afternoon in sixth grade, with the windows open to the heat of what, in those innocent days, we called Indian summer, our math concentration melting in runnels down the roots of our hair—there was not so much as a fan in Brillo’s room, an absence she justified by explaining how distracting the whir of such a machine could be on young minds mastering sentence diagrams—we heard seventh graders, her recent graduates, trailing loudly home from Lincoln Junior High, which was a few blocks away on Harvard Street. One of the many advantages of aging up was the earlier dismissal time.

I can’t remember what we were doing, but I do remember when the voices outside floated up from the street and settled on me like an unwelcome hand on the back of the neck. Gradually, the discord congealed into a unison jeer. “BRILLO! BRILLO!! HEY BRIIIILLOOOOOOO!!!”

The classroom was sucked into silence, stiller even than when Brillo would glare at our hopeless fumbles with fractions. I felt, more than heard, a thick rustle of fabric behind me. She strode forward, her back to the class, Kong among the circling airplanes. She reached up to take the long pole that hung by the window, seven feet of polished red oak with a brass head shaped, I always thought, like an upside-down map of Italy, a tool even the tallest teachers needed to reach the upper sash of the windows, the top of which, when closed, was a good ten feet above the floor.

We kept our heads down, pretending to be absorbed in our own work while actually waiting, through the fisheye lens childhood provides for detecting adult foible, to see what would come next. It seemed perfectly plausible she would stomp down into the street twirling the pole like a spinster version of the Kung Fu masters newly popular on TV and scatter the baboons like bowling pins, or use it as a medieval jousting lance to skewer them, or, with a primitive guttural cry, hurl it from the window like a javelin. Instead, though it was a hot afternoon, she scraped upward to dig at the topmost sash with the male ferrule, which slid with a click into its brass keyhole-shaped notch. Without undue haste, she pushed it closed and did the same with the two other sets of windows. Then, re-hanging the pole and reaching up empty handed over her head, she pulled the bottom sets of the three panes shut with both hands.

At the last window, the one closest to me, she stretched on tiptoe from her thick wrists down to the sturdy black shoes—the same kind our nuns at St. Clements wore during CCD classes—and the effort exposed a dark half moon of sweat under the left arm of her short sleeved blouse. The impressive wattle below her biceps swung like a rope bridge in a gale, and memory, its full Freudian camera rolling, seems to provide—though it can’t have been true—a view down the tunnel of that sleeve into the forbidden shadows of the armpit itself, where a patch of hair furled like an anemone. Our obsession with what we referred to only as B.O. offered more engaging and acceptable sub-plot possibilities, though no scent of anything, other than the usual classroom bouquet of mucilage and our own warm-weather stenches, reached my row; certainly before this none of us had gotten close enough to her to establish a baseline from which any current aroma might or might not depart. But something else compelled our larger fascination when she finished enclosing us in what was now becoming the steaming greenhouse of the room and turned again toward her desk.

Hearing the last window thud shut, we lifted our heads almost against our will, like a herd of antelope at the watering hole who’ve felt a tremor. Though she had a grip on herself tighter than any she’d had on the pole, I—we all—saw through it. As the cries outside continued, muted but not silenced through the closed windows, the meaty planes of her face turned to stone, like the gorgon we were reading about in Edith Hamilton, whose own evil power was used ironically against her. But the poetic justice of it did not mitigate or explain the flush at the back of my neck that drove my eyes again to my desk, where the lined paper stared back with blank accusation, turning me, too, to stone.

The catcall persisted day after day. A couple of classmates had siblings at “The Lincoln,” and perhaps those elders, receiving communiques from their younger spies in enemy territory, received daily intelligence that their ordnance was finding its target. In any case, they had enough vicious endurance to drive on through the fall, a siege cancelled only, like my Little League games, on account of rain.

One day after dismissal sometime later, I forgot my baseball glove behind the folding wooden doors at the back of the room where we kept coats, boots, hats, and other gear “out of distraction’s way,” as Brillo demanded, all year round. Returning to the classroom, I found her bent Talmudic-ally over the stacks of numbing busywork we had slogged through that day. The large red brick building of Tufts School—called Curtis Tufts these days—seemed to me part cathedral and part prison, quiet after school except for the echo of the janitor pushing his bucket through the halls and the hush of light traffic outside on Medford Street, where a couple of throttled maples unconvincingly impersonated the postcard image of New England autumn. In my mind’s nose I can still smell the newly mopped floors that reeked of school disinfectant, an odor of artificial pine, unctuous and suffocating.

I slunk through the classroom door, hoping to ghost in and out unremarked, if not unnoticed. As the door of the back closet creaked under my touch, Brillo looked up with a reptilian gaze over her glasses. Her eyes, glazed with reading, seemed to take a moment to refocus. Then, as if she had been expecting me, she peeled off her glasses, which fell to her chest on their chain, and indicated the chair near her desk with the slightest impatient nod. The seat seemed to yawn in its emptiness and proximity to her, as I imagine the electric chair looks to convicts. Obedience, fear, and confusion beetled through me. I couldn’t read the gesture and had no previous evidence to suppose I could possibly be the object, or victim, of any kind of invitation. I did already know that, in Brillo’s universe, to be slovenly enough to forget an important article was a steep moral failure. I had just decided to sprint gloveless back to the park when into my paralysis her voice rang like the school bell. “Sit, child!”

She never addressed us by name. It was always “Miss,” or “Mister,” or—as if it were somehow distasteful to call attention to budding sexuality by distinguishing us by gender—simply “Child.” Patti Gulino said this was because she didn’t know our names. I thought it likely she just didn’t care, which was not quite the same. In any case, it was still early in the term. Patti’s mother had been in Brillo’s class herself in sixth grade—“a thousand years ago,” according to Mrs. Gulino—and said maybe Miss Hudgins had been teaching so long all the names ran together and so, like a good teacher, she probably just didn’t want to make a mistake. Mrs. Gulino also suggested that many of the teachers, particularly the older ones, had never quite recovered from the assassination of the president four years ago. This was difficult for us to comprehend, since that November day hadn’t made any lasting impact on us second graders, and it was hard to imagine anything derailing the classroom locomotive that was Brillo or the dull carriage of school obligations. It was true that at odd moments when they were together a shaken look sometimes came over grown ups and they suddenly talked in low voices, but I always attributed this, even then, to all the liquor.

One eye still on her papers, Brillo poured some lukewarm orange juice out of a quart carton into a paper cup. I vaguely understood this was intended for me, but I did not move. My joints felt like tin. Then, without a word, she opened the square top of the small brown bakery box she occasionally kept on her desk.

This box—or rather, it’s larger cousin-—was one of the talismanic objects of my childhood, tied with fine red-and-white-dotted string from the big conical spool at Lindell’s bakery in Ball Square in Somerville, wrapped twice in quadrants around the box and knotted expertly on top into some kind of an unsolvable triple bow by one or another of the Lindells. Sunday mornings it arrived with magic regularity on the kitchen table where my mother cut the string with a satisfying click of scissors and revealed an assortment of doughnuts and the apple-butter danish my father favored. Inside Brillo’s box, as she lifted the top, I saw two of the coconut crullers my brother and I cherished above all others and sometimes fought over.

“No thank you,” I said. Polite demurral was the obligatory first response to any invitations by strangers or friends’ parents to eat. I judged, using my family’s economic struggles and my own bottomless hunger as a guide, that all hosts secretly wished to keep the baloney sandwich, the provolone, the chocolates for themselves. Part of the dance was that the offer (if it was genuine, as it sometimes was) would be made again and again.

Brillo shrugged and closed the box.

In my imagination, a confetti of shaved coconut fell in a ticker tape parade on a fleet of departing crullers driving like Cadillacs into the distance.

“You like to read,” said Brillo. It was not a question, so I said nothing. Brillo rarely asked questions, unless she suspected you would not know the answer. Otherwise, she made bold statements and challenged you to contradict or disagree. In any case, the unstated rule of my home was to speak to adults only when asked a direct question. The last thing you wanted was to call any attention to yourself—either to reveal your sinfully lazy position stretched on a bed with Sherlock Holmes adventuresand thus be summoned down cellar to do something constructive—or to be once again the subject of my father’s favorite refrain from his Air Force days: “It is better to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.”

But it was certainly true that my book reports were eager and copious.

“You are not in the Arrow Book Club,” she said. This was true. The Arrow Book Club was a subscription service that delivered a monthly dose of Conrad Richter, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Walter Farley, and other enriching classics to grade schoolers. My father, who had been laid off his job as a bus driver for the MBTA, held to a strict budget: books, never; baseball gloves, once a season. I was intended to be a great shortstop. What’s the library for? my father wanted to know.

“You have books at home,” pursued Brillo. This was much less true; beside my bed I had a handful of paperbacks rescued from library discards: the Conan Doyle, an abridged Gulliver’s Travels, Tom Sawyer, The Duke Decides by John R. Tunis. For entertainment in my house we confined ourselves to shouting at the television during Red Sox games (with an occasional physical attack on the screen, in my father’s case) and beating the lights out of each other. But it sounded enough like a question that I shook my head and discovered a thread of voice in my throat.

“I go to the library.” After the batter’s box, the one-room low-ceilinged branch library adjacent to the junior high was the place in the world I felt most at home.

“You are reading something now.”

I nodded. Brillo leveled her jowls at me, waiting.

“Lust for Life,” I said. “By Irving Stone. It’s about an artist.” To give the impression I was reading it for the first time was disingenuous. I was on my third pass through the book and now often opened it at random to revisit and memorize favorite passages.

Brillo tilted her chin to the ceiling. “Yes, I know. A lurid and sentimental work,” she humphed. I had the impression she said this more to herself than me and, though I suspected it was an insult, I had only the vaguest idea what it meant and so could not mount any defense of my favorite book.

She leaned back a little and sighed deeply. “You like art,” she said. She pointed to the wall where part of the ornithology project Willie Wunderlich and I had collaborated on was tacked up. “Bring me your cardinal,” she said.

She lifted her glasses from their chain and held the drawing in one hand at arm’s length. I had never actually seen a live cardinal; I was pretty sure they avoided Medford, for safety and perhaps aesthetic reasons. My model had come from a photograph in a magazine. “The proportions are all wrong,” she said, wrinkling her nose as if smelling something faintly unpleasant. “The beak, the crest. It’s not a parrot, child.”

I sat quietly. “But,” she went on appraisingly, “the line shows promise. There’s life in it.”

I didn’t know what to make of this. In my experience, promises, as my father often announced, were made to be broken.

“You like novels,” she continued.

I was still thinking about Irving Stone. “I like books about real things.” What I responded to in books like Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was not the magic, or the mystery, or the adventure, but the fact that the classroom encyclopedia revealed that the narwhal was real and not a convenience of Jules Verne’s imagination.

Miss Hudgins sat still and looked at me. I waited to be dismissed. Then she reached down to the gray canvas bag she carried on her shoulder to school and placed on the same little stool next to her desk every day. We had often wondered at its contents—a bullwhip, cigars, a blonde wig?—but dared not even violate its orbit, let alone attempt a peek into its depths. Now she dug in it briefly and fished out a book.

“You haven’t seen this,” she asserted.

I turned it over in my hands. She was of course correct, but in ways even she may not have understood. In South Medford, in those days, any clothbound book in its pristine dust jacket was as rare as color television. (The library either ditched the dust jackets or smothered books in an arid, industrial plastic, sometimes tore out endpapers and violated pages with a maniacal barrage of stamps, labels, paste, tape, and card pockets.) The ivory finish of the paper jacket was as smooth and welcome under my fingertips as the shiny wood of a new baseball bat. Large, black letters on the cover read In Cold Blood. For a moment I thought it was a guide to achieving the state of being Miss Hudgins approved of and modeled every day for us. There was no other design but the letters and a muted rose-at-the-end-of-a-needle graphic I didn’t understand in the upper right corner. The author’s name was printed below in red, the same size as the title: Truman Capote.

“It’s a new kind of book,” she said. “Read it and tell me what you think.”

Obediently, I opened to page one.

“Not NOW,” she huffed. I must have looked confused. “Take it with you,” she ordered and returned her attention to her papers. Only libraries, in my experience, lent books. After quite a long pause I understood our meeting to be over. I grabbed my glove from the closet, folded the book in the glove where the ball would go, and trailed away out to the park.

As fall turned to winter I occasionally found myself after school discovering a reason to return to the classroom to get something out of my desk and then staying—briefly at first, and then for slightly longer. In these further interviews Miss Hudgins talked about books or elaborated on her theories about Southeast Asia. “The Russians are not like us, you know. The Chinese … ” When I said I had liked InCold Blood and offered to return it (I had read it secretly in my room, fascinated and terrified), she said I should keep it. She herself had “reservations,” about it. “I approve of his methods, but not his goal,” she said, another of her incomprehensible pronouncements. In her turn, keeping her big face neutral, she would listen to my inarticulate enthusiasms about batting averages or the strange charge I felt when I looked at van Gogh landscapes. We never talked about family, certainly not hers and even more certainly not mine—for that too, the alcohol and the abuse, indeed for any “problem,” there was no vocabulary. It was 1967 in South Medford, Massachusetts.

Sometimes when I came in she would hand me a book across the desk—The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, or Rembrandt: The Complete Etchings—and for fifteen minutes or so she would grade papers and I would turn pages in ambiguous silence. Occasionally the principal, Miss Mack, whose skin was as rubbery as a deflated balloon, would appear and they would fence over some “administrivia.” One day, sometime in early winter, when Brillo opened the Lindell’s box, I jumped forward, snagged a doughnut, and retreated like a timid pigeon. On my walk home through the snow, the taste of the coconut, that sweet ash, still hung around my lips.

In class that year, after Willie Wunderlich and I had already cruised through our math book, whenever yet another lesson on fractions began, Brillo shooed us crossly away to a far corner to read A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court or Kon Tiki. This was what today might be called “gifted and talented enrichment,” but these impatient dismissals and meetings were part of my first recognition—in or out of my family—that there were worthwhile abilities that did not involve running, throwing, jumping, or hitting something or someone.

My classmates didn’t seem to know about my ambivalent little master classes with Brillo after school. To “stay after,” as it was called, signified only punishment. I certainly didn’t let on, and in my mind I was not “staying after” but “going back.” Perhaps she knew all the ways her reputation might compromise mine among my soon-to-be-Brillo-shouting colleagues. I don’t know whether she intuitively understood, meeting my brutish father and fawning mother on Fall School Night, how complicated things were for me at home—whether she was trying consciously to provide refuge, or whether she herself just had nowhere very interesting to go. By so many other names goes love.

In spring, when the good weather returned, so did the voices crashing like Hitchcock seagulls through the window. Every afternoon, something nameless inside me was pierced and wilted, though it turned out to be disappointingly easy to maintain a poker face. As everyone knew, Brillo was to be feared and despised, and that was that.

At the end of sixth grade at Tufts School there was no ceremony, no Hollywood last-day hugs, no gifts and cards from grateful parents for nurturing etc. etc. The concept of nurture, if not the word itself, was beyond my parents’ comprehension, and in truth it would be difficult to see how it applied to Miss Hudgin’s dealings with us. The last day we lined up as usual, waited for the familiar pedantic tones we would happily never again endure in this lifetime, and sprinted screaming with release out into the hall and down the stairs to the street below, inmates paroled. A couple of the bolder delinquents even ventured their own first giddy “BRILLO!” and then ran like hell.

I never saw her again. I’m a teacher myself now, and, like many teachers, especially at the beginnings and endings of the school year, I’m often thrown back on the memories of my own schooling. A few months ago I phoned the superintendent’s office in Medford to find some record of her, a family, a first name, even. An assistant, sounding burdened, promised to look into it.

That next fall I went on to The Lincoln. The route home took me and many others up Medford Street past the windows of Tufts School. Certainly that imposing ursine form inside the second-story classroom must have been visible from the sidewalk. If I ever peeked up, I remember only a bright fluorescence, sometimes the shades half lowered, and a few bright squares of paper stuck to the window panes—perhaps a drawing of a bird by some new trembling novitiate. And I know that on warm fall and spring afternoons, I sped with my head down past the school’s open windows, trying unsuccessfully to duck the hail of BRILLO!s that rose and fell around me like arrows. In my rush I must have looked, to anyone glancing down from those windows, like one of the guilty.

She was neither a wonderful woman, Brillo, nor a particularly good teacher, even by the standards of those days: way too rigid, impatient, terrifying, and condescending. Nor was she a heroic spirit against the odds, all that Dead Poet Society romanticism; she was just, I think now, a lonely burn-out close to retirement going a half-step beyond the bounds of her job, for her own obscure and perhaps unexamined reasons, to be nice to some kid—to play a favorite, in truth, another of her faults as a teacher. And yet all these years later, though I finally have this gift for her, I find, with shame and sadness, there is nowhere to send it.

Parts of me that I’d never seen before—my stomach and its suburban sprawl of pancreas, intestine, gallbladder, and liver—were on a screen off to my right, positioned so the technician and his assistants could have a 20/20 understanding of my innards.

I stood motionless, trying to peak at my viscera. My periphery, however, extended only to the tech’s face as he guided his machine up and down my body, using the radioactive syrup I’d swallowed an hour earlier as a divining rod. The liquid, the nurse said, would illuminate my guts and allow the tech a much easier hunt for abnormality. Drinking the liquid, the disclaimer read, would give me a 1-in-30,000 chance of experiencing kidney failure. I gulped it down anyway, desperate to know why my digestive system had been barking for the previous six weeks.

I was terrified of what the X-ray tech would find and needed all his attention on the screen; a couple minutes into the exam, however, it became obvious that his concentration was split. Trying to ease my obvious consternation, I suppose, the tech told a joke. A stupid, fucking jest of the a-priest-a-rabbi-and-an-atheist-walk-into-a-bar variety, a joke I’ve long since forgotten. Here I was, intestines feeling like they’d been operated on before the advent of anesthesia, and there he was cracking Groucho. His assistants, who must’ve heard that one before, offered only a few pity giggles.

I wanted to berate him for failing at his only mission, but the worry in me, the emotion that so often overrides all the rest, stopped me. What if I angered him and he missed something? What if he ignored it? Or what if I didn’t laugh—then what? I couldn’t risk a misdiagnosis, so I swallowed my anxiety and anger and pushed out a smirk. He smiled, too, and then said, “Well, everything looks good.”

The return of pregnancy to our house meant a renovation of the basement was in order. Our daughter would need to move into the boys’ room, leaving them without sleeping quarters. So I gathered hacksaw and hammer, level and square, flat head and Phillips and began to Bob Villa the 850 square feet of basement into submission. Over the course of a year, a small team of relatives joined me in this pursuit, and after epochs of demolishing, framing, wiring, installing, adjusting, and measuring—the present progressive verbs of my off days for the better part of twelve months—the basement neared livable status.

Mudding the drywall then sanding it down were two of the final steps. This was a tedious and messy process. Each time I took to the 60 grit, I emerged looking like I’d cut coke with a chop saw, covered top to toes in white powder. Eventually, I sanded down the final few patches of mud and attempted to sweep up all the dust, which any handyman, novice in particular, knows is nearly impossible. After sweeping three times and seeing that my bristles had scattered more dust than they had gathered, I gave up and swapped broom for mop. Afterwards, I hosed down the floor, squeegeeing the excess water and whatever dust remained into the drain.

I finished at two o’clock on a Sunday. At five, the drain threw up.

For weeks, I was sure my stomach was going to burst. At first I thought I simply had indigestion, and then the discomfort lingered for a month and a half. The slightest pressure to my abdomen caused a tremendous discomfort. I worried mostly about cancer—stage 4 ate up my grandfather from the pancreas out—and diabetes, which has been working in conjunction with muscular dystrophy to nibble away my mother’s strength a muscle fiber at a time. I even wondered if I had MD, too, even though my symptoms didn’t exactly jive with those that people living with the disease experience. I tried everything, but Tums were false hope, Pepto was a placebo, and the homeopaths the Internet suggested were teases masquerading as liberation.

My wife was on me to see the doctor, but I refused, stubborn as the pain clamping down on my guts. Then one night at dinner, I swallowed a glass of milk too quickly; as the vitamin D slid down my throat and into my esophagus, a gaseous geyser roared in reverse and stretched my esophagus to the point of rupture. The pain sent me to the floor, my chest feeling like it was going to A-bomb me into obituary.

The next day I made an appointment. Three days later, the family doc gave me an up-down, took some blood, and sent me to see the X-ray tech, who, after telling his joke and studying my internals, sent me on to the ultrasound technician.

I stood ankle-deep in wastewater, convinced that the dust I had squeegeed into the drain was the root of the problem. I plunged like I was being paid per thrust, the little plunger that had been designed to uncork toilet pipes no match for the sewer line’s girth. The water, chock full of biodegradable pulp, was brown, and it foamed at the drain site as I plunged. Five thrusts, ten, a hundred; after each set, the little whirlpool of success appeared, but lasted only seconds. I wanted to give up, but wanted to pay a plumber the going rate even less. So I plunged and plunged, holding my breath and cocking my head to the side until, mercifully, the drain gave and the water receded. Disgusted, yet content, I went upstairs, showered with antibacterial hand soap and the hottest water I could stomach, and loaded the family into the van to go bowling.

Before work the next morning, I checked the basement and found a shoreline. The plunger, which I’d left on its side next to the drain, floated like a cadaver. I dumped my cup of coffee, lightened with creamer, into the water. It was the same color.

“Now can we call Roto-Rooter?” my wife asked. I nodded, reserving the curse words bubbling in my gullet for the ride into work.

The last time I’d seen a sonogram, I was looking inside my wife’s body. Going in, I knew what I would see on the screen—a fluttering heart, a quartet of budding appendages, a human, essentially, in genesis. My ultrasound technician had no such direction and would be examining my organs with an explorer’s eye, not knowing what she’d find. I knew; I’d convinced myself weeks earlier that whatever was occupying my real estate would be, at minimum, stage 3.

As soon as I arrived in the examination room, the tech asked me to lie down. No small talk, no jokes, nothing but a stunted greeting. She opened my gown and squirted jelly on my abdomen, working her wand around like she was stewing my guts; my organs, black and white Rorschachs, again appeared, this time on a screen I could see. To me, everything was a tumor, each shapeless blob a primeval middle finger. I hated each organ in that moment without knowing which was causing me the following symptoms: bloating, heartburn, lower belly pain, pressure in the intestines, anxiety, depression, fatigue, headaches, backaches, restlessness, frequent urination. The possibilities? Crohn’s disease, gastroenteritis, appendicitis, Celiac disease, IBS, cystic fibrosis, diverticulitis, anemia, and a whole list of cancers. A flock of cancers. A herd of cancers. A murder of cancers.

When she finished, I asked the tech if she saw anything. She looked at me, face as young and sweet as a pixie’s, eyes like a coroner’s. “I’m sorry, but I’m not allowed to discuss what I do or do not see,” she said. She might as well have sent me down to the morgue.

Around lunchtime, my wife called with the details. Roto-Rooter had performed exploratory surgery and come up with three potential solutions: (1) they could jet it clean with water, (2) they could auger it free of detritus, or (3) if those options didn’t work, they could send in their camera to diagnose the problem, which could range from a foreign object blocking the pipe to the pipe being busted somewhere between our house and the road. The last option was the most expensive and would cost us thousands to fix. I assumed that to be the likeliest and continued to do so until my wife called back an hour later with the results.

“You are not going to believe this,” she said.

Tampons. A few dozen, by my estimation, expanding to form a watertight plug in the drain. But here’s the thing: my wife uses the other kind of monthly products. The cotton that had rooted there must’ve been loitering for at least three years—we’d purchased the house about thirty-six months earlier; nary a ‘pon had been loosed into our plumbing in the dozens of cycles that followed. Our wastewater had been flowing past them for years, until one day something shifted and one of the geriatric tampons, only one year younger than our youngest son, Tetris’ed itself into the exact spot we didn’t need it to, causing our sewer to back up into the basement. There has never been a better commercial for feminine products than the one that played out in the bowels of our home.

The results would be back in a day or two, maybe that afternoon, the hospital staffer told me. I dressed, got in my car, and wondered what the ultrasound tech wasn’t telling me.

After they popped the tampon barrier, Roto-Rooter found the real issue: tree roots, which had wormed their way through the dirt to wedge themselves between our wastewater and the sewer. The tampons were more or less accessories to the crime, and the dust I sent into the plumbing was a nonissue.

I’d waited all day for the bad news, stuck in the sewers of my natural inclinations of fret and exaggeration. I knew, just knew, the sewer line was busted. Knew, just knew, it would cost thousands. Knew, just knew, that the worst case scenario was coming to get me. And then it didn’t.

As usual.

A few weeks later, the boys moved into their new room.

Once the results from both the X-ray and sonogram came in, the doctor called to tell me they’d found nothing wrong. Just to be safe, she had me undergo two more tests. Those results were also negative.

“How?” I asked the nurse who called with the news. I still had the symptoms, still felt like my pipes were busted. When I questioned her further, she assured me that I should consider myself lucky.

“Many of the people who undergo that many tests don’t get good news.” I didn’t want to call her a liar, or an idiot, and the nurse likely wanted to avoid doing the same, so I thanked her for her help and hung up, convinced that the tests were wrong and the worst case scenario was still coming.

A month later, I had a follow-up with the family doctor, who told me that I likely had Irritable Bowel Syndrome. IBS is often diagnosed in people whose tests come back negative. It’s a condition of elimination. If it’s not diverticulitis or anemia or Crohn’s or Celiac or cancer, it’s likely Irritable Bowel. This diagnosis is often given to people who worry excessively, who fret obsessively. It’s diagnosed in people like me, who see apocalypse in inconvenience.

The doctor wrote me a prescription for depression meds. The meds, she said, would mellow me out, help me stay calm and even; that, in turn, would encourage the nerves in my stomach to chill.

I was cruising in K-Mart on a Saturday afternoon looking at the toys while Mom and Dad shopped for towels or something else that would completely bore nine-year-old me. We had already hit up the Christian bookstore where Mom had bought me The Music Machine, which had a song for each fruit of the Holy Spirit. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control were the nine “fruits” that should be evident in every good Christian’s life if they are walking with God. I was lucky to be good enough for even one perceptible trait on a decent day. I couldn’t fathom exemplifying all nine fruits at once unless I was asleep, or perhaps unconscious, but then it probably wouldn’t count. I suppose Mom thought that my listening to the songs would rectify the situation. Maybe it would, but as I stared at rows of new games and gadgets that would keep me, the only child, entertained on long afternoons, self-control naturally went out the window. I wanted all of them. It would have been different if I had had a brother or sister to play with for hours at a time, but given Dad’s frequent business trips, and a certain coldness that had grown between him and my mother over the past few years, such a possibility seemed slim. Very, very slim. I always tried to stock up on toys and games when I could and made mental lists for Christmas and my birthday. Easter, too. No holiday—religious or otherwise—was exempt from me trying to finagle a toy out of my parents.

The new Spirograph with its infinite design possibilities and four different colors to work with immediately caught my eye; it would be both fun and educational, as well as improve my hand eye coordination (which is how I landed an Etch A Sketch last year). I barely noticed the man walking up to look at the same set of toys until he was right beside me.

He pointed to the Spirograph. “That’s very cool. Do you have one?”

I shook my head no, thinking perhaps he was looking for his son or daughter, so it caught me off guard when he causally slipped his arm around my back, his palm coming to rest on my bare shoulder. “Would you like it? I could buy that for you if you want.”

His hand was large, but rested lightly, as if not to add pressure to the situation. Still, he was a stranger, and strangers weren’t supposed to touch me. “Don’t even talk to them,” my mother had said. It was 1979, and life was dangerous. Women out West had been abducted and found dead in the woods. Just this summer, two black children in Atlanta had been kidnapped and killed. Charlotte was only four hours away. “If anyone approaches you,” she had added, “run and find help.”

But the man had his arm around me. Was I quick enough to get away? I had always been the first person to get caught during freeze tag at recess, and that was with a head start. Maybe that’s why he picked me, because he could tell I was slow. Or was I marked in some way, invisible to most adults except for predators? Predators like my grandfather, who was also a very nice man. He had offered candy instead of toys. This time, though, I knew it was bad to say yes.

“I need to ask my parents’ permission first. They’re around here,” I said, not looking up at him in case he could tell I was lying. The towel section was all the way across the store, so my parents could’t even hear me if I yelled. There was no one else in our aisle. Lying was certainly not among the fruits of the Spirit, but it was all I had to help me, unless the angels came to my rescue like they did in the Bible stories, like our pastor said they would if we prayed hard enough. Mom had never suggested to pray in a situation like this, just to run, but I was running out of options.

“I don’t want to get you in trouble,” the man said. He slowly withdrew his arm. “I’m sure they wouldn’t mind, but I understand if you need to ask.” Then he walked away. I wasn’t sure if he smiled or not since I only glanced at him, just enough of a glance to notice he was handsome. Not scary looking. Nothing that screamed monster. And he did leave, which meant he was probably just nice, but weird.

I let out a long breath. I didn’t want to stay there, yet Mom and Dad had told me not to wander away from the toy section so they could find me. Besides, they could have moved on from the towels. I walked a few aisles over to where the Barbies were lined up in rows of bright pink boxes. Already, I felt a little better even though there were still no other kids or parents around. The store felt oddly empty, but there was the new Color n’ Curl Candi doll head with makeup center. I was hooked. Technically, I wanted to be a scientist—I even had a microscope and a chemistry set at home—but there was nothing wrong with learning a few hairdressing skills on the side. I was looking at what accessories came with Candi when I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. The same man walked by at the other end of the aisle. I held my breath as he paused, looked my way, and kept walking.

Then it clicked. He hadn’t really left. He was just waiting. I wasn’t fast, even with a head start, but a head start was all I had.

I shoved the box back into place and broke into a run in the opposite direction, flying past the pink-drenched shelves and making a hard right at electronics. I didn’t know if he was behind me or keeping up with me, perhaps even ahead of me, trying to cut me off. I wove my way through the furniture section, a blur of brown, black, and grey,not even bothering to ask another adult to help me. Who could I trust? Everyone was a stranger. Finally, I saw neat stacks of blue, green, and burgundy ahead—the towels. I slowed down, expecting to find Mom or Dad, but they must have already moved on. They could be anywhere in the store now. The man, too. I sprinted towards bedding and made the special whistle our family used to find each other in crowded places. It took a couple of attempts because whistling when running and terrified wasn’t easy. A moment passed, then another, until finally, a similar whistle answered. I sped towards it until I ran smack into my father, which was basically like running into a tree, he’s so wide and muscular.

“A man … stranger,” I gasped, “offered to buy me a toy.” I gasped.

My father looked around as if half expecting to see someone chasing me. When he realized I was alone, he whistled once, then twice, until my mother appeared with a shopping cart.

“What’s going on?” Mom looked irritated. She didn’t like her errands being interrupted. “We told you to stay in the toy section.”

“A man approached Nancy Lee,” Dad said in his calm and collected way. Always calm and logical, even when he found out that his dad had molested me and other kids. My father never raised his voice about any of it, or cried in front of me, from what I could remember. Maybe he hid all other feelings.

“What the hell!” Mom shouted and grabbed my hand. She had no problem getting angry. “What did he look like?”

“He was tall, like six feet or more.” What else? I didn’t remember much, just his palm resting on my shoulder as if it belonged there, as if there was no question that he have should placed it there. I had let him get too close, had been too trusting. Again. “He wore jeans and a t-shirt.”

“Did he hurt you?” Mom pulled me to herself, as if to defy anyone who would snatch me away. She was only 4’9” tall but I was convinced that any man would need to call every demon of Hell to help defend himself against her wrath.

“I’m going to look for him.” My father walked off in the direction of the toy section, his short, powerful strides taking him quickly out of sight. While my father had more girth, the man was much taller. I don’t know who would win in a fight since they both seemed like such gentlemen. A duel would make more sense in their case. Pistols and swords at dawn, perhaps.

“Did he do anything else to you?” Mom’s question brought me back into the present, then to a place of what could have happened. She made me look her in the eyes because she knew I sucked at lying. “You can tell me.”

“I’m okay,” I said, even though I was angry at myself for being so easily duped into talking to him. He wasn’t a gentleman, just as my grandfather wasn’t really a grandfather, or a missionary, or any good identity he wanted us to project to the world. Those were erased in the peach guest room where I slept on weekends, where there was an eye scratched into the wall just opposite the bed. It marked me, that eye, and what it saw go on between us, and now other predators could find me, too. But I didn’t want my mother to worry about all that. Her jaw was already clamped tight, eyebrows raised in a way that indicated she was ready for battle. I wanted to ask her about the angels, if they would have rescued me. Certainly Mom prayed enough for them to protect us every night as well as throughout the day, and yet there was no mention of them now. Perhaps they only helped if you had enough fruits of the Spirit, say, seven out of the nine. Or maybe together they wrapped a blanket of invisibility around you, so that no predator could ever find you again. I doubted we needed any of this right now since Mom had that wary, fierce expression all mothers get when they believe their family is under attack. No man wants to mess with that look.

Dad returned within ten minutes. “He wasn’t around the toy section so I alerted security. I think he might have left the store.”

Once in the car, Mom reminded me again not to talk to strangers, no matter how nice they were. My grandfather was downright charming. He got a lot of kids that way. He had gotten me that way.

“It was good that she told him we were nearby,” my dad offered as a kind of compliment. “That was quick thinking, Nancy Lee.”

“Next time just run and get us,” Mom said, standing firm.

I wanted to remind them that we lived in the South now, not Philadelphia, and being nice to everyone was basically the unspoken eleventh commandment. More importantly, why did there have to be a next time? No other girls in my fourth grade class talked about men approaching them in stores or the park. Maybe it was something that wasn’t discussed, just experienced and dismissed as an unpleasant fact of life, like visits to the dentist. Besides, people disappeared under horrible circumstances all the time—I thought about those terrible stories of the missing kids and women. Okay, maybe not all people. Maybe not men. The rest of us, though, we had to be careful. I had to be careful, maybe more careful than most, given that predators seemed to find me rather easily. Maybe the demons told them where I was. Mom has been listening to Pastor Kenneth Copeland’s sermons about binding evil spirits and casting them out before they can accomplish their dirty work. Go on the offensive. I wondered if I had prayed hard enough, really prayed and believed, could I have silenced the voices in that man’s head, turned their dark whispers into tongues of fire like on Pentecost? How much faith would that take?

In two years, something like this would happen again. Except it wouldn’t be a stranger. It would be a teacher at my private Christian school. And he wouldn’t touch me because predators are creative, if nothing else in this world of next times, this world of angels and demons and broken men. But as we pulled out of the parking lot that Saturday afternoon, my only thought—my only thought, which eventually became a prayer—was to grow so strong nothing would ever break me again. I had yet to understand that brokenness was already carving out of a remote space inside of me that accepted both humanness and monstrosity as a fact of life, a place that wouldn’t necessarily keep me safe from every seductive voice, but from where I might one day cry out to the angels, and make them finally listen.

I roll the vial between my hands, warming the milky liquid, the bottle clinking against my silver rings. I sit on the chaise near the bed and peer at the razor-thin lines which encircle the barrel of the syringe. I wear my + 3.00 cheaters in the slanted pink frame. They make me feel like a movie-star and I hope to chase the doubt I feel too often, but most heavily on Thursdays.

After I draw the measured amount into the syringe, I set the not quite empty vial on the floor and invert the syringe upright as if I am a scientist in a lab. A quick flick of my middle finger expels any air bubbles. I depress the plunger to release a drop which pops over the edge of the needle, hanging as if fearful of the fall. It trembles and slides along the needle.

I breathe, feeling almost as satisfied as I will be after the injection. I can understand how addicts love the needle. “Ready?” I ask.

At four o’clock on a humid afternoon, the sun beats into the bedroom and I want to think the flush on my face is from the heat, but I know I am anxious, frightened that I will do something wrong, waste the dose. This is not the first injection, yet it feels as if it is. I never get used to this moment, and I suspect my husband does not either.

On Thursday, every Thursday, I fetch a vial from the egg shelf in the refrigerator to begin the process of administering his medication via a subcutaneous injection.

Thursday is named after the mythical Norse God, Thor, bringer of the storm, who wields his hammer into thunder and lightning. His hammer can, on occasion, possess healing properties. We did not choose Thursday. Our first monthly supply arrived, a series of four vials, accompanied by four needles, on a Thursday afternoon, announcing and declaring the beginning of the aggressive treatment regime we had chosen. I had never thought of Thursday as magical, or as a special day.

Each Thursday I approach him wishing I felt the booming power of Thor with his thunder and flashing light show, instead of the need to vomit. I feel the sweat bead on my forehead, and tears begin to sting at my eyes, but I do not succumb. A single drop of sweat, like the drop of medication, crawls down my hairline. I brush my face with the back of my arm before I study the serious red line blinking, triple checking that I have drawn the proper dosage.

Thursday at 4 p.m. is our scheduled time as the monthly delivery arrives via UPS. The driver knows us. While he can’t change his schedule, which depends on how many other packages he hauls, he assures me he will never be later than 3 p.m. The yellow package with red and white tape sits until four o’clock. I have to stab my husband fifty-two times.

I think of how many more times this regime will occupy our Thursdays. “All right all ready,” he says. “Let’s get it over with.”

I hear his impatience, but I have to angle the syringe to the proper forty-five degree angle for a subcutaneous injection. The tricky part is to extract the needle exactly as it entered. When I do not, his skin raises a welt, lumps appear. I think about how many times my hand wavered.

“Stop pushing me” I say, not taking my eyes from the spot I decide is perfect. “Always telling me what to do.”

“Always” he says. His voice is flat, the innuendo of our life together—always and forever, Mary and Neal—lays flat, as he does on the bed.

I touch the leg. I feel him tense. Like Thor and his hammer, I grant more pain than comfort. Sometimes I want to be unconcerned and to find a calmness in the moment. Then, I rethink the sharp needle, the metal intrusion, the immediate redness, the feel of his chapped skin against my hands. I don’t want to embrace this moment. I want to erase it.

I do want to excel because my love demands this, however the truth is more selfish. The better I get, the faster mortal time passes. I need to get this right to deflect our unspoken dread of more than fifty-two weeks, of a future with vastly different fifty-two weeks. My fear dribbles out as armpit sweat, and I smell as if I have been working heavy labor for days.

I can never allow Thursday afternoons to become a habit. Habits invite carelessness. Carelessness begets mistakes. Mistakes can lead to an overdose.

I never feel comfortable with the medication, certainly not the needle. I wonder if Thor is frightened by the power of his hammer, booms of thunder, casting bolts of lightning. Perhaps not. Lack of fear may be the definition of a god, and my trepidation the true essence of a mortal.

I cannot be responsible for anything other than a properly executed injection. I can hold this success in my hand, regardless of anxiety.

The red line radiates like a stop light in the mist.

I never think of the medication as a miracle, or a gift of life. As I approach the target with the needle, he grimaces and turns his head. He too is afraid of the needle.

I stab him. The oppressive heat of the day presses on me as I jab his raw flesh, obliterating the world we inhabited before the treatment. Before. That time is an elusive memory. After. A lovely sounding word.

How will I be after? My thoughts hide behind the red line on the slender syringe. After. We shall not be as we were. I know I have lost a part of him. I am embarrassed to worry about myself when I should worry for the man who needs this medication. I thought all he needed was love.

My hands quake.

Without turning his head near the leg, he says, “Don’t worry.”

The tiny girl inside me tap-dances on my confidence. “I’m not.”

His voice is not like himself; he is not himself, and will not be himself for a Vivaldi year. How we will return to ourselves is a mystery. Worry circles round and round.

Before he raises his pants, baggy now, despite the humidity he shivers, his skin puckers into goose bumps, as if his body wants to hide the welt from my eyes. His thigh, skin rawer than the week before, glows pinker than my lipstick.

It is forty weeks and we have lived, adjusted, and managed.

I convince myself this too is part of love. Romantic, I think not. I recall our vows, spoken before a justice of the peace. I understand why in wedding ceremonies we are asked to pledge our love in sickness. Anyone can love in health.

If love is sufficient then I should not fret, but I do. I purchase expensive wrinkle cream to stop the creases in my forehead from deepening, and I always use scent. I will not allow him to miss my beauty, as he has missed so much this year. I hope he remembers.

After the injection he raises his hand to touch me. I don’t recognize his smooth skin—his callouses gone—he has lain ill that long. He cannot keep his eyes from glazing in pain. I wipe beads of sweat from his forehead, cooing as if he is a child, “There, there.”

I do not want a child. I have never wanted a child.

There are conversations not held, or held too closely in love. We have become adept at wearing our shields. He promises he will not grimace and I say I will not shiver. We love our lies as much as each other.

The cat will not leave his side and she does not purr, but watches with her yellow slit eyes. When he wretches and dry heaves, we, the cat and I, arch our backs and the hair grows tall on the back of our necks.

Later I prepare his shower. He is unable to stand for too long so the water must be the correct temperature, the towels ready, everything in the proper order. I stand with him, every Thursday, a day I have come to despise.

I fluff the towels, smooth the soap, and adjust the shower head. He shivers, the cat meows and he melts into the bubbled soap. At that moment I rejoice that I am the one who soothes, the one who takes away the pain.

We do not cuddle under the covers on Thursday evening, we huddle—words that sound similar even look similar, but in the heart, in the bed, are not the same. We are not a team. Thursday separates us. He is the patient. I am the caregiver. His illness parts our wellness. He wretches again and does not see my face as I mop the floor, wipe the stain from the pillow.

On Thursday, I stay beside him, longing to run away, to take myself to the past or the future, wishing I did not have to stay. I stay. I will stay.

Then Thursday becomes Friday and I breathe because it will be a week before I stick him again. Tears flow on any day, but not on Thursday. Tears make reading the line on the syringe too difficult, and the cream around my eyes smears and this he cannot bear.

He strokes my hair and holds me, pats me, and whispers it is okay. I do not believe him and turn away. I have no poker face.

The next week I close my eyes as I depress the plunger and now it is eleven shots until the end, the same number of pounds he has lost this month.

His hand opens, closes, and holds nothing.

There is only Thursday, that damned day, and he says only a few more, then vomits and apologizes. For a moment, uneasiness grips me. What if this becomes our only memory, all others eradicated, and we will never have new ones, only the Thursday routine.

One of the side effects of the medication as it passes through the brain stem, which controls the diaphragm, is spasm. Thursday night thrums with hiccups. Thankfully, the cure for his hiccups is a pill, not another injection.

Years later, he remembers nothing of that time, not the injections, the welts, the itching, the pain, the hiccups that raged. He is free of Thursdays. He is himself, a bit different, almost the same. When I awaken on Wednesday nights I feel his warmth, his bulk, and solid flesh, yet I do not close my eyes again because I remember and cannot forget. I still hate Thursdays and never tell him that day has been stolen from me.

On Thursday evening, I roam the house in the dark hours until the next day. I worship Friday, dedicated to the Norse goddess Frigga, who manages marriage. I honor the goddess, and believe she will guard and care for me. On a Friday morning I drink coffee with my husband. I ask, “Isn’t ‘Six Days a Week’ a Beetles song?”

My cousin Pattie was my best friend when I was fourteen. A year older, physically mature, and streetwise, she was coach and companion for my first forays into 1950s-style mischief. I was gullible with a puppy-like eagerness to be liked and accepted, and gamely stepped outside my comfort zone.

Pattie spent the night on New Year’s Eve. My parents went out and promised—I took it as fair warning—that they would be home soon after midnight. We watched musical specials on TV and mocked their sappiness. Bored by the time the ball was to drop at Times Square—9:00 p.m. our time—Pattie asked if there was any booze in the house. “We should have a drink to celebrate,” she said. My father’s heavy drinking was a source of contention for my parents, so there was no hard liquor in the house. Our search turned up a bottle of Manischewitz Concord grape wine that my mother kept on hand for Jewish holidays and menstrual cramps. I poured us each a stubby juice glassful. We toasted and sipped, neither of us acknowledging its disgusting taste: cloying and medicinal.

“A drink always makes me want a cigarette,” Pattie said.

“Yeah, me too,” I replied.

“I’m gonna quit for New Year’s,” she said, “so it would be nice to have one last smoke.”

I agreed to both quitting and wanting to kiss off my “habit” with a few last, fond puffs.

We found an open pack of Tareytons, a long-gone brand with the grammatically incorrect slogan, “Us Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch!” Or maybe they were Raleighs, which came with coupons my mother collected and redeemed for gifts. I’d seen my parents smoke all my life—nothing to it, I figured—but I burned my fingers holding a lit match to the cigarette before I realized I had to suck on it for the paper and tobacco to ignite. I inhaled, just a little at first, and coughed. “I must be catching a cold,” I said. “My throat’s scratchy.” When we’d finished we fanned the room, disposed of the butts, and washed the glasses. At midnight we went outside to watch nearby fireworks. My rite of passage was behind me. I would become more adept at smoking, drinking, and other vices in the days ahead.

2.

I used to pose in front of the mirror. I’d hold a cigarette at different angles, dangle it from the corner of my mouth with narrowed eyes like the husky-voiced vamps in movies. I’d inhale deeply … exhale in smooth streams or plump rounded rings. I smoked in school bathroom cubicles and behind the gym, in my bedroom with the window open, at parties, drive-ins, the beach. All my friends smoked and drank. When I was fifteen I met an older boy with sky-blue eyes, a flaxen ducktail, and a smile that liquefied my brain. He didn’t smoke and didn’t think it was cool; he told me I smelled like an ashtray. Besotted and eager to please, I stopped. When he broke my heart after a brief but blissful summer, cigarettes—true friends that never fail you—consoled me in my anguish. I would slip into a hidden corner of the back yard, light up, and sob between deep drags.

3.

My parents had been smokers since their own youth. At sixteen I thought it was time they let me smoke openly, join them in the ritual after-dinner cigarette. But first I had to tell them. I was a secretive kid, more used to hiding than disclosing things. I waited for what seemed the right time—a Saturday morning, both of them relaxed and in a good mood—then blurted out:

“I have something to tell you,” I started. “You’re going to be mad at me. It’s terrible …” The dramatic buildup was a result of nerves, not strategy, but by the time I confessed my sin, they were prepared for the worst: pregnancy, drug addiction, expulsion from school. I couldn’t have planned it better.

“Is that all?” they asked with relief.

4.

My daughter was born before widespread alarm about the risks of smoking and drinking during pregnancy. I’d been doing a lot of both. One January night I got wasted on rum and coke while burning through a pack of smokes. The next day the rancid aftertaste of the booze was amplified by the sour remains of the cigarettes. My mouth felt like a gravel path: dry and gritty, scattered with dead bugs and bird droppings. My hangover lingered for days, and the thought of lighting up turned my stomach. When I learned the source of my queasiness—I was pregnant—it seemed right to quit.

I started up again a couple of years later as an on-and-off thing after meals, with drinks, under stress—until my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. That was the deterrent I needed. It was more effective than pictures of diseased lungs or the scene in “Dead Again” when Andy Garcia smokes through a hole in his throat. I quit for good, as did my father and brother. My mother stopped long enough to undergo surgery and treatment; minus one lung she resumed smoking. The cancer returned and spread until her death a few years later.

5.

By forty I was a devout convert to healthy living. I wanted to work in health education, so I enrolled in a public health master’s program. The faculty focused on smoking as society’s great evil, made it the target of our health promotion efforts. It troubled me that they singled out smokers as enemies of society. Blaming the victim takes society off the hook. Weren’t there more critical public health problems, like poverty and disease? Who were we to cast blame from our lofty towers of privilege? I didn’t light up in protest, didn’t quit the program, though tempted to do both. I did come away with empathy for smokers.

6.

Novelists and filmmakers understand the sultry appeal of smoking. From deep post-coital drags to scenes in every film noir, clouds and curls of smoke create a heady atmosphere. The ultimate in seduction was to light two cigarettes at once and hand one off to an intimate other. In Brideshead Revisited, Julia is driving and says to Charles, “Light one for me….” Julia is a spoiled debutante, oblivious to Charles as a potential suitor. He’s an impressionable young man, infatuated with her dazzling and eccentric brother Sebastian, but he perceives the significance of the act: “As I took the cigarette from my lips and put it in hers, I caught a thin bat’s squeak of sexuality, inaudible to any but me.”

7.

My artist husband likes to experiment with materials and texture. For a time he was intrigued by the foil linings in cigarette packs. They had a shimmery, veined, mirror-like quality with random flaws that resembled antiquing. They reminded me of how, when we were kids, we saved tinfoil from candy and gum wrappers. We mashed them into shiny balls, and when we smoothed them out the wrinkles created a jewel-like patina.

His co-workers started saving empty packs for him, but he needed more for his collages. On a morning walk, a red Marlboro box on the sidewalk caught our eye, a bit of the shiny foil sticking out from the top. We exchanged glances, picked it up. We found a few more that day—smokers generally aren’t environmentalists—and scavenging for empties became a regular feature of our walks. We gathered them off sidewalks, streets, and parking lots, in residential and commercial areas. We adopted the line in The Third Man, when Popescu says to Holly Martins: “Cigarette? Keep zee pack.”

8.

My daughter said she’d never smoke. She was thrilled when I stopped, thought I did it for her. To some extent I did—to set a good example, to live past my mother’s sixty years. Like me, my daughter succumbed to peer pressure in her early teens. Like me, she quit while she was pregnant—dangers to the unborn well known by then—and started back up afterward, sporadically, until she decided to take up running. Lungs restored to purity, now she runs marathons.

My grandson used to lecture his father about the evils of smoking: “C’mon, dad, quit for me!” In high school he gave up baseball and football, took up Camels. I see my teenage self at the mirror, recall the conflicted feelings of invincibility and vulnerability. It’s all part of growing up: rites of passage, wanting to be cool, taking risks, making choices.

I was still half asleep when I noticed an odd spot on the ceiling. “What’s that?” I asked Rick. He was already dressed for work.

“Nothing. I have to go in early today, I’ll call you later.” The door slammed and he drove off.

Now fully awake, I understood that the dark spot was a line of bees coming through a crack in the plaster: first three, then six, suddenly a dozen. Besides being a city girl, I’m allergic to bees. My husband knew this, having heard the Emergency Room doctor for my last bee sting say, “The next one could kill you.”

I jumped up and fled the thickening bees overhead. Cramming a bath towel under the bedroom door, I resisted the urge to crumble into a heap and await certain death and instead, threw a raincoat over my nightgown and ran barefoot to the apartment complex office, which was not yet open at seven in the morning.

I sat down to wait, using the time to reflect on how much my life sucked. A young couple with little money, we had moved into this apartment three months earlier hoping to salvage our deteriorating marriage. What next?

Finally the building manager arrived, eyeing me as if I were a homeless prostitute. “Yes, what is it?”

“We’ve met before, remember? I live in Madison Gardens, just down the road, apartment 3B, and there are bees in my bedroom!”

“So? Don’t you have any bug spray?”

“There are many, many bees, they’re coming through a crack in the wall.” I was bordering on hysteria.

“Well, let’s just see,” she said. We drove to my apartment in her car. As we approached the building we saw the glass wall of my bedroom, apparently covered with a dark, moving curtain. Except it was bees—hundreds, thousands, who could count that high? Miss Skeptic gasped.

Back at the office, she summoned the fire department, the county sheriff, the police, and two exterminators, each arriving with major equipment. It turned out that one whole side of the three-story brick building housed a huge colony. “Never seen the likes of it in all my 20 years,” the sheriff declared.

By 10 a.m. my bedroom wall was demolished, asbestos foam covered everything, and dead bees were a foot-deep. Miss Skeptic decided to move us into a vacant apartment in the next building until ours could be repaired.

Miraculously I had not gotten stung. Feeling empowered by that fact, I got dressed and called Rick at work. Before I said one word he whispered, “It was bees. I know. I’m sorry.” Explaining that he had fled the scene because he “just couldn’t handle it,” he promised he’d come right home.

Sometime around midnight he stumbled in, claiming it was someone’s birthday and a group had gone out for a few drinks after work. I moved out the next day. That was 30 years ago. But I can still hear his whisper as if it were yesterday: “It was bees. I know. I’m sorry.”